Review: Not My Bag

Luxury clothing retail and gay men. Aren’t they supposed to go hand in hand? Or hand in bag, as the case may be. I guess some clichés are true, since writer/artist Sina Grace presents the tale of a naive young gay man who, having crashed his car, goes to look for a job and lands one as a sales assistant for women’s clothing at an upscale store. A perfectly innocuous occupation, one might think. One couldn’t be more wrong.

The boyfriend

Loosely based on the author’s own experience, Not My Bag¹ is a rather terrifying tale of cutthroat competition in a plush setting. Kind of Macbeth with money flowing instead of blood. I must admit I wasn’t that well disposed toward that story at first, since I’ve never understood the attraction of fashion, while the character dreamed of Alexander McQueen’s clothes and accessories. It felt almost painful to see him go from wide-eyed hopeful to bitter veteran over the course of book, which is a proof of Grace’s talent for making us empathize with his character.

While the retail tales of shifty coworkers and clients with two much money and time on their hands take a large part of the book, Grace also introduces a good dose of more personal problems, such as his character’s difficulties regarding relationships, past and present–though he’s in one with a nice lawyer when the book opens, his former boyfriends appear as ghosts in the story, bringing an amusing weirdness to the mostly down-to-earth narrative. The other important facet of the character’s life is his struggle with his art, which he finds hard to devote himself to when holding a full-time job.

A coworker portrait

As you can see, this book is thematically quite rich. Grace also beautifully blends text and art, in a style strongly reminiscent of Craig Thompson’s (see my review of Liberty Annual 2011 for a gay-themed short story by Thompson, the author of Blankets and Habibi). His strong writing is on display in his pointed coworkers portraits, which are as funny as they might seem cruel–but considering the merciless analysis of his character’s behavior later in the book, I think those portraits are simply realistic.
As I said above, the former boyfriends float around the characters as ghosts, a good metaphor for the unresolved feelings and the need for closure that the character experiences.

The character in Not My Bag is old enough to have some years behind him, and thus enough to look back on, but young enough to be able to try and change what he doesn’t like about his life. The contrast between the two, and the reflections on choices made, enrich a story which could have simply been a depiction of a particular milieu, a specific job with its own set of rules. But Sina Grace is obviously talented enough to make it more than that. And since he’s recently hinted on his blog that he’s working on a sequel, we can look forward to more inventive metaphors and evocative art.